The Brezhnev Regime A Portrait of a Soviet Leader

The first opportunity to delineate that position in ways that supported the institutional rights of the party and that gained advocacy from among party members preoccupied with preserving their powers arrived in relation with the economic changes supported by Alexei Kosygin in the 1960s, which reluctantly provided greater controls and autonomy to enterprise-level staff (Westwood 1993). On the contrary, the primary responsibility of Brezhnev emphasized the long-established rights of the party and claimed sustained dependence on party power and management in the economy. Instead of tolerating the appearance of even the most fragile of self-governing market relationships, the General Secretary claimed for sustaining party involvement and organization as the means to enhanced performance. In its first appearance, such sustained party governance provided the encouraging possibility of superior institutional strength within a governmental structure that had been shaken by the persistent reforms of Khrushchev and that distressed the unusual domain of even fragmentary reforms (Laird 1987). In a more expanded point of view, Brezhnev’s justification of party rights bore with it ever more clamorous demands for enhanced performance. Whilst he justified the influences of the CPSU against the decentralization schemes of Kosygin, he appealed for party groups in the economic bureaus to take on higher accountability for the accomplishment of their guest institutions. They were to break new ground in facilitating technological transformation and modernization, in cutting through managerial blockages, and in organizing the programmes of their collapsing bureaus. The party was undoubted to fulfill a higher interventionist function, but one dissimilar from the impulsive intervention that had typified its programmes under Khrushchev. Instead, its brand new involvement was to be embedded in its developing administrative and technological complexity and in its capability to reunite limited departmental concerns with the wider point of view (Suny 1998)